While on vacation in Belgium recently, I came across all sorts of really fantastic public art, and functional “street furniture”.  I’m excited to see what the City of Ottawa will be procuring as part of the Integrated Street Furniture Program. Below you’ll find my roundup of benches in Brussels.

Recently I had to create a custom lead collection form for a Magento Commerce site I was working on. Surprisingly, an explanation on how to do this wasn’t so easily found so I had to hit the IRC channel in hopes of finding someone who might have some answers. After a couple attempts, friendly community user Vortex was able to provide a solution using the following method:

What we basically end up doing is creating a custom template, and then put our form processing code in that .phtml file. It’s not the ideal method, but I haven’t found any better alternatives yet. Here are the steps:

1. Open up  app\code\core\mage\cms\etc\config.xml, and add a template for your form processor, it should look something like this:
   <interest_form>
   <label>lead capture form</label>
   <template>page/leadcapture.phtml</template>
   </interest_form>
2. Now switch to the home\app\design\frontend\default\theme_name\template\page folder and create your leadcapture.phtml file (or whatever you called it in the above step).
3. Here I copied the contents of the existing 2-column template that I then just modified it as required, but you could write this part from scratch if you wanted.
4. Once saved, I went into the Magento admin under CMS and set the Lead Capture page to use the lead capture form template.

Again, special thanks to Vortex for these instructions. If you see him in the IRC chat, don’t forget to thank him.

It’s a bit of a hack, but it works. If you know of a better way, please share in the comments, thanks!

With the recent passing of the Ottawa Cycling Plan, I thought it would be interesting to highlight some of the more innovative cycling-friendly things I’ve seen recently. First up is a bike stand in Berlin that doubles as a bicycle pump:

Designed by Studio HiMom, the Heklucht pump was originally developed for an art project in Ypenburg, a newly built Dutch neighbourhood. With the goal of stimulating neighbourhood interaction, eight of the stainless-steel units—available in multiple colours—were placed in front of eight Ypenburg houses. The Heklucht won a Dutch Design Award back in 2006 in the category of public space products, and has since been installed also in Gent, Vienna and Leeds, Studio HiMom says.
via Springwise

The other cycling-related innovation I saw recently (also on Springwise) was a vending machine for bicycle parts, interactive maps, how-to videos, as well as free air. This one was sponsored by Trek, a bike manufacturer, but could easily be sponsored by Trek and a local bike shop perhaps near a cycling hub somewhere in the city.

“Motorists have it easy,” says Hammond. “Gas stations, convenience stores, auto parts stores, tow trucks—you name it. The support network for cars far outclasses cyclists. The Trek Stop aims to change that by breaking down some of the ‘worries’ attached to cycling.” While the Trek Stop is currently just in prototype form and slated to run for only another month or so, Seattle-based Aaron’s Bicycle Repair has actually had a similar vending machine in place since 2005. With items like inner tubes, flat repair items, energy bars and gel, the machine is located just outside Aaron’s for after-hours service.
via Springwise.

What do you think? I can think of a couple of times when I’ve been out cycling some of the paths in the city when I realized I could do with a little more air in my tires. I think a few well placed public pumps at some of the larger path hubs would be pretty handy.

Following the soft-launch of OpenOttawa.org last week (full launch to follow with more volunteers onboard and FixIt Ottawa), I’ve posted on the Mayor’s Taskforce on eGovernment report site regarding open access to public data. Locking away data that is created with public monies behind individual access requests, dissemination fees is no way to encourage a local culture of innovation and experimentation.

You can read up on it at http://ottawa.taskforcereport.ca/blogs/threefunda/openaccess/.

What are your thoughts? I realize the importance of assigning a nominal fee to disseminate data so that city staff aren’t wasting their time fulfilling superfluous requests, but publishing some basic sets of data that can be used for publicly accessible tools and mashups would go a long way in  jumpstarting innovation around community tools and services. The potential value derived from the resulting tools would supercede the negigible costs associated with providing the data to begin with.  I’m getting too far ahead of myself, but perhaps even a documented CityAPI?

DemoCamp 7 takes place tonight from 7:00 – 9:00 at the Clocktower Brew Pub on Bank St. I’ll be there tonight checking out what looks to be some exciting demos from Ottawa’s tech community. The last DemoCamp I was at (6) was pretty good, so I’m looking forward to this one.